Frankfurt School contra Heidegger: Adorno's Cultural Critique of the

19 Pages·2012·0.05 MB·English

Frankfurt School contra Heidegger: Adorno’s Cultural Critique of the Ideology of
German Existentialism in The Jargon of Authenticity

Dustin Garlitz
University of South Florida
May 1, 2010
In this paper on The Jargon of Authenticity, I will focus on the ideological
dimension of Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of Heideggerian existentialism. My focus
examines Adorno’s preoccupation with the idea that German formulations of
existentialism resembled the banality of authoritarianism. In addition to examining the
jargon’s working relationship with fascism, I will look at Theodor Adorno’s criticism of
Martin Heidegger’s language from Being and Time as an overall advancement of Karl
Marx’s analysis of the fetishism of commodities. In situating the advancement, I plan on
investigating the extent to which notions of history are employed throughout the ‘aura’ of
the jargon. This will lead me to question if the mechanics of Heidegger’s language are
really ahistoric, as Adorno claims.
I develop a position in the paper that points to the Heideggerian field of
phenomenology’s early history of being a worldly-discipline, culturally engaged with the
social structures of a capitalist mode of production. I will then argue that it may have
only been Heidegger’s particular iteration that shut out social reality. In beginning to
launch an argument that is more sympathetic to Freiburg than Frankfurt, I will point out
that Heidegger was in fact a major contributor to philosophical hermeneutics, and that
Adorno may only be focusing on one dimension of this thought (existentialism) when he
generates ahistoric criticism of his employment of language. By the close of the study, I
express the idea that Adorno believed all fascist-friendly philosophy to be an aberration
of thought, making Heidegger no worse than philosophers who were in fact politically
minded, such as Carl Schmitt.
Adorno critiqued existentialism and phenomenology throughout his entire career
at the Frankfurt School. The young Adorno submitted his habilitation on Kierkegaard:
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Construction of the Aesthetic in 1931 Frankfurt to German existentialist Paul Tillich. In
1950s Germany, after an extended stay in the United States, Adorno generated a mid-
career critique of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology titled Against Epistemology: A
Metacritique. The late Adorno’s critiques of Heideggerian existentialism were published
as The Jargon of Authenticity (1964) and Negative Dialectics (1966). In addition to
Heidegger, the Jargon examined the existentialism of fellow German philosophers
Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, and Paul Tillich, and criticized their underlying indebtedness
to Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophical system.
The major problem Adorno had with Soren Kierkegaard’s contributions to
Continental philosophy centered on the Dane’s rejection of Hegelian speculative reason.
In Kierkegaard, Adorno found a bourgeois alternative to Karl Marx’s response to G.W.F.
Hegel. What Adorno does throughout the Jargon is construct a Hegelian-Marxist
rejection of the German existentialism that developed from Kierkegaard’s fundamental
problem with critical reason. The theme of Kierkegaard’s that Adorno is most critical of
in the Jargon is the doctrine of love, which he sees as influential in Buber and Tillich’s
existentialism. The doctrine highlighted Kierkegaard’s overarching philosophical theme
of radical inwardness, which Adorno finds informing Buber’s I and Thou relationship
and Tillich’s stressing of religiosity as an end in itself (both lacked a dialectical character
according to the Frankfurter).
The Frankfurt School’s Adorno envisioned philosophy as a dialectical mediation
of subject and object in a class-based, exchange society. According to Adorno, the
existentialism that started with Kierkegaard, moving forward into 20th century German
thought, fixated on a notion of subjectivity and ‘being-in-itselfness’ that lacked the
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historical determinedness of an objective social reality. This was developed to the point
where Adorno sees the 20th century German existentialist pushing, “a jargon that employs
a blank nominalistic theory of language, in which words are interchangeable counters,
untouched by history”. (2003, pg. 5) However, he finds that, “history does intrude on
every word and withholds each word from the recovery of some alleged meaning, that
meaning which the jargon is always trying to track down.” (ibid, ibid) This is a reason
why Adorno is not just critiquing existentialism, but in fact isolating the ideological
dimension implicit in its German manifestations. By overlooking the theme of critical
rationality, Adorno finds German existentialism vulnerable to the historically totalizing
phenomena of market-liberalization.1
Adorno deconstructs Heidegger’s terminology from Being and Time, finding that,
“The empirical usability of sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and the
listener believe in their corporeal presence. The either is mechanically sprayed, and
atomistic words are dressed up without having been changed. Thus they become more
important than the jargon’s so-called system.” (2003, pg. 4) Adorno subjects
Heidegger’s terminology to the power of imminent criticism, and advances Marx’s
analysis of the fetishism of commodities. As far as Heidegger’s Being and Time is
concerned, “the symbolisms of the jargon do not represent actual social relations but
rather symbolize only the relations between abstract concepts. Lost in the fetishism of
the jargon is the actuality of the historical development of human consciousness.” (2003,
pg. xiii) In the archetypical dialectics of the Frankfurt School’s modernity, language is
entangled in a progressing demythologization, in which there is a removal of its magical

1 I will examine this aspect more closely starting on page 6.

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origins. However, Heidegger’s existentialism thrives off a “crude conception of the
archaic in language” (2003, pg. 34), making it no better than positivism for Adorno’s
social theory.
Adorno finds the development of a 20th century existentialist movement that is, at
surface, intended to encourage notions of self-liberation and subjectivity, in reality
actually blind to the class-based social tensions and alienation brought about by a
capitalist regime. Existentialism was in fact originally conceived in the very context of
capitalism, and Adorno finds it further mystifying that the jargon’s subject matter has
always ignored the social construction of reality. Adorno stresses that throughout a text
such as Heidegger’s Being and Time, there is terminology employed in the existential
system- such as the word “uprootedness”- that have preindustrial, peasant histories,
insufficient for addressing the exploitation of late industrial capitalism. Rather, Adorno
sees Heidegger’s existentialism declining into the Marxian theory of reification, since it
forgets the role that institutions plays in forming the subjective sphere.
Moreover, in Heidegger’s “homey” and primal jargon awarding only the
immediate pleasures of its reader, the existential sphere of self-experience is void of any
“objective context of human society”. (2003, pg. xii) Further, “The dialectic is broken
off: the dialectic between word and thing and the dialectic, within language, between the
individual words and their relations.” (2003, pg. 8) He finds the jargon exploiting the
capacity of philosophical language to mean more than is simply present in the signing of
the language. Therefore it becomes evident that Adorno’s fundamental problem with
existentialism is two-fold: he finds its internal mechanics are flawed and its problem-set
lacks teleological scope.
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The intention of Heidegger’s language originally centered on answering certain
questions of freedom and subjectivity, yet Adorno cannot acknowledge its capacity to
engage injustices and disparities in social relations. In fact, he believes the language can
after the fact actually harbor totalizing phenomena such as fascism. Adorno finds that in
German existentialism’s jargon of authenticity, “language provides fascism with a
refuge”. (2003, pg. 3) In Heidegger’s jargon of authenticity, “that division between the
destructive and constructive, with which fascism had cut off critical thought, comfortably
hibernates”. (2003, pg. 15) Adorno sees a ‘shifting’ of ideology into language, to the
point that the usage of such language actually is ideology. Adorno provides a
commentary in the Jargon that points to how Heideggerian themes, such as ‘historical
destiny’ in Being and Time, could have comprised the rhetoric of National Socialism.2
As far as the Frankfurt Side of the critique of ontology is concerned, Espen
Hammer emphasizes in Adorno and the Political that, “In a society dominated by the
abstract exchange-relation, such a procedure of fetishization, he [Adorno] argues,
produces pseudo-concreteness and false forms of immediacy. While, in a well-
established democracy, the anti-enlightenment cult of origin may just be bad art, in the
Germany of the 1930s it became official policy.” (2005, pg. 107) The former is how the
jargon’s everydayness could have informed the rhetoric of Germany’s fascist threat,
providing room for the full expression of the political economy of conservatism.
In the procedural culture of National Socialism, Adorno does in fact see certain
political theories (and not just the inward-turned culture of existentialism) harboring evil
and focused on the wrong problem-set. This makes the conservative philosophies of

2 This line of thought has been further pursued by Richard Wolin in The Politics of Being (1992)
and Johannes Fritsche in Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1999).

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Schmitt and Heidegger two sides of the same coin. Both were compatible with the
bureaucratic theories of National Socialism according to Adorno, who believed that it
made no difference one focused inward while the other theorized about social relations
and its constructs (international law).
The jargon of existentialism and phenomenology has always resembled the more
banal characteristics of the administered world, according to Adorno. He writes that,
“The jargon proves itself as a piece of the negative spirit of the time; it institutes socially
useful work within the tendency already observed by Max Weber; the tendency for
administrative to expand out over what they consider as their cultural domain.” (2003, pg.
65) The banalities of totalitarianism were implicit in Heidegger’s jargon from its
inception for Adorno, who believed that the perpetuation of, “The fussy attention to
individual words, as they were lexically handled in the days of the pre-Heideggerian idol-
phenomenology, was already the harbinger of bureaucratic stocktaking.” (2003, pg. 70)
Nazism’s procedural culture was an aberration of thought according to Adorno. He
found the aberration to have deep historical foundations, and believed there was the
corruption of a wide variety of 20th century German intellectual pursuits in the course of
its full emergence.
Adorno believes that fascism, in addition to being a conspiracy, came to life over
the course of an actual social development. He finds that existentialism, in its design, is
not intended to address the social relations that made such a coming to life historically
possible. He points out that its notions of subjectivity are intended to negate this societal
dimension. In reality, though, the language had an ‘aura’ about it, providing ‘soil’ for
fascist iterations. It is partially discrediting, however, that Adorno is famous for
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considering his critical theory to be “language without soil”, since in this he meant
critical theory was intended to be a worldly pursuit that, despite his criticisms of
Heidegger, was far removed from historical inevitability.3
Adorno believed that the ‘aura’ of Heidegger’s existential jargon, in addition to
being a mystification of thought (Frankfurt School cultural critic Walter Benjamin found
this to be the case with anything containing ‘aura’), actually resembled the vulgarity of
the Culture Industry. This entailed a gratification of only immediate desires, as was the
case for all the Culture Industry’s products. By examining existentialism by way of the
gratification employed throughout the manipulative advertising jingles and commercials
of the Culture Industry, Adorno finds that the jargon, “gives itself over either to the
market, to balderdash, or the prevailing vulgarity.” (2003, pg. xix) This makes for a
much different gloss on Heideggerian terminology than we see in other theorists’ reading
of existentialism. The decay of Heidegger’s term ‘ereignis’ (translated in English as ‘the
event”, “the event of appropriation”, or more precisely “the event of mutual
appropriation”, and even possibly, “the happening”) by manipulation and false
consciousness becomes obvious very early in the Jargon, and Adorno demonstrates
throughout the book how things can really go awry in late capitalist culture.
Throughout his critique, Adorno continues to discuss the relevance of the Culture
Industry and Benjamin’s ‘aura’ in Heidegger’s jargon of authenticity, as far as both
theoretical design and reception are concerned. He finds that, “The jargon pursues
artisanship under the shadow of industry, as carefully chosen as it is cheap; it gathers
reproduction of kitschy life-reforming impulses that real life has buried under itself, and

3 This ahistoric theme of Adorno’s critical theory has in fact been recently pursued in Richter’s
Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity).

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spares them the hopeless testing ground of actualization. Instead, language rolls up its
selves and lets it be understood that right action, in the right action, is worth more than
reflection.” (2003, pg. 89) The former is Adorno’s testimony, as possibly the most vocal
member of the Frankfurt School, to the thesis that there are serious dangers associated
with outright rejection of Hegelian critical reason. Dialectics are about transformation
and change for the Frankfurt School. Without dialectical mediation of subject and object
(what Adorno considers the existential philosophy’s ignorance of “any perception of the
praxis which brings about changes”4), the revolutionary moment of full realization of
exploitation never occurs. Instead, the Heideggerian subject and its sacrosanct realm of
self-experience are further lost in the false consciousness of the Culture Industry, with its
deluge of intellectualized artifacts including, by convenience, the German existentialist
movement’s literature.
Another philosophical theme of Heidegger’s that is critiqued by Adorno in the
Jargon is shelteredness. He thinks that in appealing as an answer to one’s existential
fears encompassing shelter and security (such as in the case of ‘existential homelessness’
in the late Heidegger), the jargon overlooks real social fears of unemployment and
physical homelessness/displacement brought about the irrationality of a capitalist mode
of production. He finds that in Heidegger’s “idle chatter”, the readiness to hand
interprets “suffering experience as its opposite”. (2003, pg. 87) Moreover, Adorno points
out an ahistoric misappropriation of Heidegger’s in the fact that the social material
spontaneously critiqued as alienation and reification for Hegel and Marx is strictly
interpreted on ontological grounds for the existentialist: as “bodily” and “a function of a
Being-form of Dasein” in the case of Heidegger’s Being and Time. (2003, pg. 88) With

4 2003, pg. 89
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the description of non-spontaneity, I assume Adorno is emphasizing the part of the
Heideggerian system that renders Dasein a historical category of Being. However, such a
concept of ‘historicity’ in Heidegger’s overarching system points to the fact that there is
at least some dimension of history in the existentialist’s outlook (even if he or she uses
language in an ahistoric way).
Rather than look only at Heidegger, the Jargon turns some of its attention to
Jaspers and his existentialist critique of Marxism in Man in the Modern Age. Not only is
Jaspers critical of Marxism in this book, but he also dismisses psychoanalysis and racial
theory. If one interprets the Frankfurt School’s critical cultural theory as the intellectual
synthesis of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud (as was especially the case for someone like
Herbert Marcuse), of course it is possible to anticipate Adorno, the proponent of the
Frankfurt School, having major problems with Jaspers’ 1933 publication. Jaspers finds
that hatred comes to life in Marxism, as well as in psychoanalysis and racial theory, and
their primary tendencies are ones resembling a destructive nature. Adorno counter-
critiques Jaspers’ argument by describing the existentialist as a plunderer of language
itself (also think of Heidegger’s very notion of ‘destruction’ in Being and Time), rather
than a civic-minded intellectual who realizes its full descriptive potential.
Adorno describes the German existentialists and their followers as a ‘cult of
authenticity’. He considers these individuals comprising the cult of authenticity “anti-
intellectual intellectuals” (2003, pg. 3), whose ‘new religion’ gains acceptance from and
wins over anyone who thought that at one point or another they were (or had
characteristics that were) authentic, but did not feel it was necessary to express it at the
time. Instead of the advertising jingles and commercials of the Culture Industry and its
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